Book: Trump Team Held Secret Situation Room Meetings on Epstein
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- "Regime Change" by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, publishing June 23, reveals that Trump's top aides — including Vance, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and other officials — held multiple Situation Room meetings last summer to manage the growing Epstein scandal.
- JD Vance floated enlisting Tucker Carlson to interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, hoping she would state Trump had no involvement in any wrongdoing with Epstein, while simultaneously telling the group he believed all the files should be released immediately.
- Donald Trump wanted "the whole Epstein issue buried" and was "snapping at anyone who mentioned it," with staff largely avoiding the subject in conversations with him and worrying among themselves instead.
- Dan Bongino, then Trump's deputy FBI director, warned the situation was "going to be President Trump's Iran-contra," with the authors writing the crisis "exposed" that Trump "could not...make Jeffrey Epstein disappear."
- Trump called News Corp CEO Robert Thomson, owner Rupert Murdoch, and WSJ editor in chief Emma Tucker in an effort to quash a WSJ scoop about his ties to Epstein, telling the British-born Tucker she "must hate America."
- Joe Scarborough called the book "one of the most important books on the Trump presidency" on MS NOW's "Morning Joe," prompting Trump to attack him on Truth Social within an hour, a post Scarborough read on air.
- White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said Trump was "totally exonerated," pointing to document releases, cooperation with the House Oversight Committee subpoena, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and calls for more investigations into "Epstein's Democrat friends."
Why it matters: An Iran-contra comparison from inside Trump's own FBI deputy — paired with documented calls to pressure a newspaper's editor — collides directly with the White House's "total exoneration" narrative, a contradiction that will intensify House Oversight scrutiny and media investigations of how the administration handled the Epstein files.
